The present invention relates to the field of computer systems. In particular, the present invention relates to electronic message composition with relevant documents.
Communications technology today allows individuals to send messages to one another from virtually any location in the world at virtually any time of day. The variety of communication modes (e.g., telephone, network, computer, etc.) and communication media (e.g., electronic mail, voice mail, facsimiles, etc.) available today allows individuals to choose among the many modes and media depending on the circumstances.
In general, message senders today may select from a variety of communication media while message receivers are limited to the option selected by the message sender. If the sender uses the telephone to leave a voice mail message, the message receiver is required use a telephone to retrieve the voice mail message. If the sender uses a computer to send an e-mail message, the message receiver typically uses a computer to retrieve the e-mail message.
Interfaces have been developed that create multimedia messages. E-mail editors such as Outlook(copyright) manufactured by Microsoft(copyright) Corporation of Redmond, Wash., allow a user to include xe2x80x9cattachmentsxe2x80x9d within mail messages. The attachment may be any electronic file, such as a spreadsheet, letter, or graphic. HTML editors, such as Frontpage(copyright) manufactured by Microsoft(copyright) Corporation of Redmond, Wash., allow a user to create documents with embedded images and audio clips. These documents may be e-mailed or viewed from a Web site.
One problem with such systems is that they do not retrieve the documents that are to be referenced in a message. Users often retrieve documents manually by attaching files to an e-mail. Thus, the user must know exactly where the relevant files are that are to be retrieved and have the message composing software attach them to the e-mail message. With immense disk storage space and increasing storage locations, finding relevant files on the user""s system is time consuming and difficult. Furthermore, even if a user knows the physical location of a desired file, the number of steps required to retrieve the file can be very time consuming.
A method and system for composing electronic messages with relevant documents is disclosed. In one embodiment, one or more documents of different types are collected. Then, context documents from the one or more documents are selected. Finally, related documents are provided that are relevant to the message and are associated with the context documents.